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Veal in White Sauce

Veal cutlets simmered in a white sauce made from butter, flour, milk, onion, herbs, peppercorns, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Veal in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook without browning.

  3. Boil the onion, herbs, and peppercorns in the milk, then strain them out.

  4. Pour the milk over the butter and flour mixture, stirring until it boils.

Cook the veal

  1. Cut the veal into cutlets and simmer gently in the sauce until tender.

  2. Remove the meat and arrange it on a serving dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg with a few drops of lemon juice and a spoonful of gravy or milk.

  2. Pour this mixture into the sauce, stirring briskly over heat until it thickens.

  3. Strain the sauce over the meat and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Neck of veal
Provides the meat that becomes tender as it simmers in the sauce.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth white sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, carrying the flavour of the aromatics.
Egg
Thickens the finished sauce as it heats, giving it a richer texture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the sauce. Egg proteins set when heated, so the sauce should be stirred briskly over gentle heat and not allowed to boil. Otherwise the egg can curdle and the sauce turns grainy instead of smooth and thick.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, flour, pepper, egg, milk, parsley):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Potatobetter flavor fit
  3. Chivebetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, pepper, egg, milk, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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